Verizon and AT&T Cutting in on Credit Card Turf

If Bloomberg's got it right, and they often do, Verizon and AT&T are currently teaming up up in an effort to displace much of the the need for credit cards in the retail universe by allowing consumers to pay for their purchaes with a wave of their smartphone.

According to the report, the venture also includes the cooperation of some other financial sector and telecom heavy-hitters, including T-mobile, Deutsche Telecom and Discover Financial Services. Even as the news hits the street, hardware has already been installed at serval test retailers in Atlanta, where individuals blessed with the venture's prototype smartphone software/hardware combination will be able to simply wave their smartphone handset over a terminal and pay for whatever they please, leaving Mastercard and Visa's bothersome plastic wafers well out of the equation.

If the technology is widely adopted, it could mean very big things for the companies involved. Credit cards, as you may have guessed, are big business. As an example of the sort of money we're talking about here, Visa and Mastercard processed $2.45 trillion worth of U.S. consumer spending last year. That's a lot of mad money.

With similar services already successfully available in Europe and Asia, there's a good chance that we could very well see the system come into play in North America in the not too distant future.